Finally, some hundreds of young girls, overcoming the timidity of
their sex, asked for engagements, their families not to know about it;
others wished only to serve him."
This ideal Joffre was compounded out of the victory won by him, his
staff and his troops, the despair of the war, the personal sorrows,
and the hope of future victory. But beside hero-worship there is the
exorcism of devils. By the same mechanism through which heroes are
incarnated, devils are made. If everything good was to come from
Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roosevelt, everything evil originated in the
Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin and Trotsky. They were as omnipotent for evil as
the heroes were omnipotent for good. To many simple and frightened
minds there was no political reverse, no strike, no obstruction, no
mysterious death or mysterious conflagration anywhere in the world of
which the causes did not wind back to these personal sources of evil.
3
Worldwide concentration of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare
enough to be clearly remarkable, and every author has a weakness for
the striking and irrefutable example. The vivisection of war reveals
such examples, but it does not make them out of nothing. In a more
normal public life, symbolic pictures are no less governant of
behavior, but each symbol is far less inclusive because there are so
many competing ones. Not only is each symbol charged with less feeling
because at most it represents only a part of the population, but even
within that part there is infinitely less suppression of individual
difference.
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